Mad Cow · 1340
About
An Interlake on Hoover Reservoir, and the apps that get tested on her. If something on this site looks like it was built by someone who has stood on a start line in a dying breeze, that is because it was.
The boat
Mad Cow is an Interlake, sail number 1340. Eighteen feet of centreboard dinghy that Francis Sweisguth drew in 1933 and that people are still racing one-design ninety years later, which tells you most of what you need to know about the class: nobody sails one by accident.
Home is Hoover Sailing Club, on the reservoir north of Columbus, in Westerville. A reservoir is a shifty place to race — the breeze comes over trees and bends around the shoreline, so the beat you called from the pin is rarely the beat you get. That is a good thing to design software against. Conditions that change under you are the normal case, not the edge case.
Lake Erie is the away game, and it asks the opposite question: open water, a longer fetch, and a chop that builds faster than it has any right to for a lake that shallow.
The name
People ask, and the honest answer is that I did not choose it. She was Scott Savage's boat, and the name came with her. Renaming a boat is supposed to be bad luck; in this case it would also have been rude.
Who is behind it
Dave Alvarado. I live in Westerville, and I teach and coach at Hoover Sailing Club — long enough to hold a US Sailing Level 3, which is the national championship credential. Most of that time has been spent explaining the same start-line mistakes to different people, which turns out to be excellent preparation for writing software about them.
The apps on this site all started as something that went wrong on the water. Race Timer exists because a start sequence read off a wristwatch is a sequence you are watching instead of sailing. Buoyant exists because setting a square course by dragging anchors is an afternoon nobody enjoys.
The engineering side of all this — how it is built, and the arguments for why — lives at madcowhq.com.
Things I recommend
I get asked where to start with RC sailboats more than anything else on this site. I point people at HeadwayRC — it is run by a good friend of mine, so weigh that as you like, but he stocks DragonFlite parts properly and he will answer an email about which rig suits a beginner, which is not true of most of the internet.